This exposition consists of creations of recognized classics of Soviet art, who developed the traditions of Russian realism, such as artists Geliy Korzhev, brothers Aleksey and Sergei Tkatchev, Valentin Sidorov, Vladimir Stozharov, Viktor Ivanov, Aleksey Gritsay, Sergei Gerasimov, Peter Ossovskiy, Nikolay Andronov, Natalya Egorshina, Ivan Sorokin, Yuriy Kugach, as well as sculptors Mikhail Pereyaslavets, Ivan Korzhev and Alexander Burganov. The exhibition featured the most significant creations of post-war period, covering a variety of styles and artistical devices, existing inside synthetic genre “socialist realism”. Realism as a manner of presentation was interpreted by this authors pretty much permissive, and they resorted both to impressionism and abstractionism and primitivism. They saw “realism” not as the manner, but the matter, uncompromising facts of life. Idyllic pictures from life of Russian and Soviet countryside in paintings of Tkatchev brothers and Valentin Sidorov, lyric landscapes of Aleksey Gritsay and Sergei Gerasimov comfortably sit alongside with creations of Geliy Korzhev, full of tragic reflection about the man’s destiny and his place in social world.

These painters, so different in interpretation of Russian realism, were united by true love for their homeland, for the age in which they happened to live and work, as well as fundamentally different feeling of art as the way to devote themselves to the truth. Truth, honesty, sincerity are the main manifest of painters of sixties. In this moment of history it suddenly became possible to deviate from mythologization, glossing of Soviet reality, the cult of perfect body and “right” temper became things of the past, as they were inherent to the big “Stalin” style. Real, non-perfect men, their simple worries, their fears  - life in all its everyday occurrences was brought to front in Soviet art for the first time.

Despite a bit of intimacy – about 100 paintings were exhibited, this collection allowed the visitors to deeply feel the spirit of that time: in genre pictures of rural life, joyful, but not cheap; in sunlit landscapes, full of fresh air and expectations for peaceful happiness; in portraits of contemporaries. Chronologically, the exhibition covers the period from mid-1950s to 2000s, which allows the visitors to get a better view of creative work of painters, which are presented in permanent exposition in the Russian Museum, as well as to acquaint them with works of such artists as Andrey Kurnakov, Alexander Gritsay, Mikhail Kugach, which weren’t formerly included into the Museum’s exhibition projects. The exhibition was organized with support of Sobranie Fund, Magnezit Group, AO Raiffeisenbank, Ernst & Young (CIS) B.V., RoullierGroup, ANH Refractories Company, E.K.W. GmbH, Knöllinger FLO-TEC Gmb, SMS Siemag AGH.